Quick Response to Ben Santer’s Comments at RealClimate:
Ben Santer has an article over at RealClimate defending himself against some claims made recently by Fred Pearce in a series of articles Pearce did for the U.K.’s Guardian in recent weeks.
In particular, Santer discusses a 1996 paper that he (and colleagues) published in Nature magazine in which they reported to have identified a human [...]
Read the whole thing.
(Via World Climate Report.)
Friday Procrastination: Link Love : OUPblog: Take classes at Oxford University from the comfort of your home.
Read the whole thing.(Via OUPblog.)
Not Simpson, but the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. We have a rich patrimony of literature, art, and thought in the last three millennia. Are we abandoning it for Grand Theft Auto? That most high school graduates need to learn skills to get a decent living seems fair enough. But what about the ten per cent or so who will go on to positions of leadership in our society: the lawyers, doctors and so on?
If our leaders are out of touch with our own history and the riches of our culture, then we are being led by amnesiacs. The will to power of our leaders might turn us all into hedonistic philistines, the easier to be led.
So I justify my old age search for knowledge of the humanities, so that I might be less easily bamboozled by our plausible, but ignorant leaders.
Steynianism 151: "~ REBUILDING THE FOUNDATION: ‘A pretty good summa of the humanities’ …. (worldontheweb)"
(Via Free Mark Steyn!.)
One of the things I'm expecting, and occasionally experiencing, in my academic endeavours is a steady, unreflective progressive liberalism. I try to think of it as a challenge to sharpen my thinking and communication skills. Now I'm wondering to what extent the grey-hairs of the sixties are experiencing angst over a new generations indifference to their creed.
A recent art history course included a lecture on Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa, a classic of baroque sculpture. The professor compared the saint and the angel over her to carnal lovers, sated by orgasmic sex. Apparently, this is a standard modern interpretation of Bernini, as ridiculous as that is. That a religious man portraying a mystic's experience of the divine would intend the viewer to equate that with sexual gratification is nonsense walking on stilts. As the Wikipedia article says:
It is arguable that in the seventeenth century, it was possible to draw distinctions between religious and erotic experience that are more difficult to make today.More's the pity for us, I say.
The lack of empathy from the students was palpable. The speaker then invited the young women in the audience to publicly confirm that a snippet of Saint Teresa's written description of the mystic experience sounded exactly like a woman's experience of coitus, which was embarrassing to me, at least. The professor responded to the continuing silence by pointing out that these kinds of graphical analyses would be presented to us repeatedly in future courses, so we had better be prepared.
To what extent was the silence of the audience just a natural modesty, to be overcome by repeated assaults of this sort? The professors reaction might suggest that something else was happening, a rejection of the idea that ecstasy must, at root, be carnal and sexual, period. Or, perhaps, that modesty is a value they cling to in spite of the invitation to abandon it. At this point it's still my impression that the students were more career-oriented and more modest than the professor was entirely comfortable with.
Academic Point Counterpoint: "This week was the annual meeting of the editorial council of First Things. In addition to taking care of the business that magazines have to attend to, the custom at these meetings is to take up a major subject or two. This year, Wilfred McClay of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga led the discussion [...]"
(Via FIRST THINGS: On the Square.)
Christ Against the Multiculturalists: "Address written for entering students of Wabash College, Class of 2012
Christians believe that God became human in Jesus Christ. If so, it follows that there is something called humanity. That is, humans have a nature, a shared or common nature. Human nature is not just a social construction. Human nature is real. And if it [...]"
(Via FIRST THINGS: On the Square.)
So we're on a theme here. Can you successfully pry the remains of a classical education out of the modern university's course offerings? Even my current course, which deals with an introduction to reading and writing about short stories, poems and dramas, has a healthy dose of modern prejudices--'we have almost fifty per cent women authors'. Why? How does this advance my understanding of the best of these forms of literature over the last five hundred years?
The May issue of The New Criterion is concerned with education — mostly of the ‘higher’ variety. Contributors include Roger Kimball, Alan Charles Kors, Robert Paquette, Victor Davis Hanson, James Piereson, and Charles Murray.
"(Via Southern Appeal.)
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"Thinking with the Church begins with thinking"
Father Richard Neuhaus
